Читать книгу Daughter of the House - Rosie Thomas - Страница 13

Devil came to Nancy’s room long before daylight.

He said hoarsely, ‘Your mother is ill.’

Nancy pushed back the bedcovers and ran. She found Eliza sweating and semi-delirious. When she put her hand to her forehead she moaned and twisted in the soaking sheets.

Devil asked, ‘Where has she been? What did she do yesterday?’

Nancy’s mouth went dry with fear. There had been a woman who coughed like a walrus. Cornelius had raised his head at the word.

‘She went to Chapel Market.’

A crowded place, ripe for the spreading of infection.

Eliza’s skin had taken on a strange blue tinge and she fought to draw in air through lungs that audibly bubbled with mucus. The intervals between each breath and the next seemed endless.

Father and daughter stared at each other across the tumbled bed. Neither of them uttered the word, but they didn’t need to. Devil’s face turned the colour of clay.

Through her rising terror Nancy tried to speak calmly. She would have to take charge of the situation; instinctively she knew that her father could not. ‘We must cool her down and help her to breathe. Bring me some water, washing cloths, towels.’

He hurried away, his slippers flapping on the linoleum of the landing.

Nancy slipped her arm beneath Eliza’s shoulders, and her heart twisted with love as well as fear as she supported their negligible weight. Eliza clutched at her wrist. Her eyes were wide and wild with fever.

‘Carlo?’ she gasped. And then another word that might have been Christmas.

‘Hush, Ma. Just try to lie still and breathe. We’re taking care of you.’

Devil returned as Nancy peeled away the sodden bed-clothes.

‘Now bring some dry sheets and a clean nightdress.’

He seemed relieved to do whatever he was told. She heard him fling open the doors of the big linen press on the landing.

Nancy wrung out a washcloth in an enamel bowl. She sponged her mother’s forehead and chest and then drew the sheet from beneath her before wrapping her in the towels. All the time she murmured as if to a distressed child, there, let’s get you dry, we’ll take care of you, I know it hurts.

She held her close, her lips against her burning forehead. Already the skin was pearled with fresh sweat. Nancy’s eyes met Devil’s.

‘You must go for the doctor.’

His nod held all their misgivings. Medical attention was not easy to find. Many doctors were still in France, attending to soldiers who couldn’t yet be brought back home. Others had dispersed to the overflowing military hospitals, and the voluntary nurses as well as the paid ones had mostly followed them.

Devil pulled on trousers over his pyjamas. ‘I’ll ask Cornelius’s man to come, shall I?’

‘Be quick.’

‘Carlo,’ Eliza muttered again, and then ‘Jakey? Jake, speak up. They can’t hear you in the gallery.’

She gave a sudden wild laugh and just as abruptly a spray of reddish foam came out of her mouth. Nancy wiped her lips and chin.

You are not going to die, she silently insisted. Don’t even consider it, because I won’t let you. I need you too much.

She held her until she seemed calmer. Racking shivers followed on from the sweating. Gently she laid her back against the pillows and pulled the hem of the soaked nightdress up to her mother’s thighs. Eliza’s hand descended like a claw and tried to prevent her from lifting it further.

‘It’s not Carlo, Mama, it’s me,’ Nancy whispered. ‘No one else is here to see anything.’

Tears rolled from the corners of Eliza’s eyes but she was too sick to protest further. Nancy lifted her mother’s hips and pulled up the nightdress. What she saw made her catch her breath in shock. Eliza’s belly was a pillow of white flesh scored with deep creases. Nancy knew only her own neat anatomy, and the glimpse of her mother’s damaged body made her gasp with shock.

Even in the grip of the fever Eliza knew what was to be seen. Her lips stretched in a rictus of distress.

‘I’m sorry.’ Nancy removed the garment and threw it aside, then as gently as she could she towelled her mother’s body and dressed her again. She spread a clean sheet on Devil’s side of the bed and hoisted her on to the fresh bedclothes. She covered her with the blankets, smoothed her hair off her face and held her in her arms, wordlessly praying. Eliza’s eyes were half-closed. Each successive breath seemed to be dragged out of her body.

Nancy listened to the steady ticking of the bedroom clock, counting the seconds as they built into slow minutes.

At last she heard the front door rattle and two pairs of boots treading up the stairs.

Dr Vassilis was a very old man with straggling whiskers and a bald domed head. He had clearly dressed in haste. His metal-framed spectacles chafed flaky patches at the bridge of his nose. The Wixes knew that he was kind, because Cornelius was not afraid of him, but he was not the best doctor in London.

He put his bag down on the end of the bed and took out a muslin mask that he hooked over his ears. Eliza saw his half-blanked face and writhed away in terror. Devil and Nancy had to hold her down so the old man could lower his stethoscope to her fluttering chest.

The doctor stepped back after making his quick examination.

‘Spanish influenza is highly contagious,’ he muttered in his Greek-accented English. ‘To nurse her I advise you both, three layers of muslin, so, over the nose and mouth.’

‘To hell with the muslin, tell me about my wife.’

Vassilis shook his head at Devil. He looked like an old sheep.

‘You will do no good to be sick like she is.’

‘What can we do?’ Nancy begged.

‘Aspirins is the best medicine. Keep her warm, if she will drink let her have it, watch her carefully.’

‘Is that all?’

Vassilis nodded sadly. ‘I can tell you, it is in a way hopeful that your mother is older and not so strong. This flu, I don’t know why – and I am only a doctor, perhaps it is God himself who understands these things – it seems to like the young and the strong best of all. They die like this,’ he clicked his bony fingers, ‘and the weaker ones, babies and old people, they stay alive.’ He shrugged.

Devil gripped one of the brass bed knobs so tightly that his knuckles whitened. For once he was completely in the room, no other concern colouring his expression, his face stripped naked by anxiety. Nancy’s thoughts flicked to her mother’s ruined body and just as quickly she steered them away again. She could read love for his wife plainly written in Devil’s face. He would be a smaller man without her. Nancy had always assumed that it was Devil who led the way, charming other people and pleasing himself, while Eliza resented his glamour. Now it occurred to her that he was only trying to deflect some of the power she held over him.

What a complicated measure men and women were obliged to dance, she thought. She didn’t include herself in this company, or even wonder when her own dance might begin.

The doctor took a brown vial from his bag. ‘Two of these for her, every four hours. A high dose but it is best in such a case.’

At the door, as Devil was showing him out, he asked, ‘How is Cornelius?’

‘The same,’ Devil told him.

But that was not quite true. When daylight came and it seemed that Eliza was poised on the very margin between life and death, Cornelius slipped into the room.

Nancy got up from the bedside to try to warn him or perhaps to shield him but he gently put her aside. He studied his mother’s congested face and listened to her breathing, then lifted her wrist to count her pulse. He was composed, although he understood how ill she was. Eliza opened her eyes and saw him.

‘There, Ma,’ Cornelius soothed. ‘I’m here.’

The winter light crept across the floor. The three watchers sat in silence until Devil’s chin drooped on to his chest and he fell into an exhausted doze. Nancy tensed with Eliza’s every breath but Cornelius remained impassive. When Eliza coughed so hard that she retched up mouthfuls of pink mucus he wiped it away and afterwards moistened her lips with a few drops of water.

An hour passed and then another. There was no change, but Eliza still breathed.

‘We should send for Aunt Faith,’ Nancy said at last.

Devil lifted his head. ‘I will do it.’ He was glad of anything that was not just waiting.

It was time for another dose. Cornelius took the bottle from Nancy and administered the pills, doing it more deftly than she could have done. She saw that he had somehow been hooked from his despair into the detached state that must have allowed him to do his work in France. It was odd to feel any satisfaction on this terrible morning but she did feel it, and it grew stronger when her brother touched her arm and said in a voice that was almost his own, ‘She is holding on, you know.’

When Faith arrived two hours later in response to Devil’s telegram, Eliza had fallen uneasily asleep. Her features were sharp and her eyes had sunk deep into their sockets.

Nancy and Faith wordlessly hugged each other.

Faith was wearing the dark clothes she had put on after Rowland was killed on the Somme. His death had come only a little more than a year after Edwin succumbed to his wounds at Ypres. Faith’s happiness now was all in her grandson, Lizzie’s child, although there had not been so much satisfaction when the baby came far too soon after Lizzie’s hasty wedding. The marriage had not lasted many months into the war and the whereabouts of little Thomas Shaw Hooper’s father were not now known.

Matthew Shaw said, ‘You couldn’t trust that man as far as you could throw him. I knew it the minute he walked through my front door.’

Nowadays Lizzie never spoke of Jack Hooper, although when she first met him she had talked of nothing else. She had breathed in Nancy’s ear, ‘God, he’s so handsome. He makes me feel like a queen and a she-devil, both at the same time.’

And then she had laughed, a strange glittering laughter that made Nancy jealous. Nancy had not then been able to imagine what passion must feel like, but now it occurred to her that she had experienced the softest premonitory whisper of it. Was it only a matter of hours ago that she had sat talking to Gil Maitland? Yesterday evening seemed to belong in another life.

Devil made room for Faith at one side of the bed and Cornelius sat opposite them. There was no space for Nancy, so at Faith’s suggestion she slipped away to make tea. The fire had gone out and the kitchen was chilly. She brought in a basket of kindling from the lean-to in the back area, lit a twisted horseshoe of newspaper and set the kettle on the hob. Her chilblains flared and she clawed absently at them. While she was waiting for the water to boil she rummaged in the drawers of the old dresser and after quite a long search found what she was looking for, a small roll of butter muslin that Mrs Frost must have used for making raspberry jelly. Devil liked jelly, although none had been made in this kitchen for several years. She laid the muslin to one side, acknowledging that it was too late now to try to protect anyone from infection. But it was the memory of sweet red jelly that prompted her to carve slices off yesterday’s loaf and toast them in front of the yellow fire. She laid a tray with butter and shop jam and carried it up to the drawing room, not even glancing out of the window at the spot where Lawrence Feather had appeared last night.

Eliza was still fitfully sleeping. Her mouth hung open and her jaw sagged. Nancy gave a cup of tea to Faith and sent Devil and Cornelius downstairs for theirs.

Nancy murmured, ‘I’ve heard that the first twenty-four hours are the worst. If she can survive the night, you know …’

Faith answered, ‘Your mother will, if anyone can. I have seen her do it before. After Cornelius was born she was more dead than alive, then a few hours later she was sitting up and trying to nurse him and insisting that he was going to live too. Matthew and I sent for the priest to baptise him, we were so certain that he wouldn’t last the day.’

‘Was she always the same?’

Faith said, ‘Yes. Always.’

Nancy almost smiled. There were no compromises in Eliza except for those forced on her by life’s reverses, and she bowed under those with little grace.

Eliza’s fits of coughing shook the house. They could only hold her arms and hope that the spasms would not crack her ribs. When the latest one subsided Faith folded a damp cloth with some drops of eau de cologne and placed it on her forehead while Nancy sponged her wrists with cold water. The pillow was sweat-soaked so they placed a fresh towel under her head.

The two women talked in low voices.

Nancy asked, ‘Carlo was the dwarf, wasn’t he? She keeps saying his name.’

‘Carlo was your father’s stage partner in the very first days of the Palmyra. Eliza and I went to see them perform an act called The Philosopher’s Illusion.’

Nancy had often heard it described. The trick turned on the dwarf’s miniature stature, which he concealed from the audience throughout by walking on stilts.

‘Carlo was in love with her, poor fellow. They all were,’ Faith added.

‘Who was Jakey? Ma talked about him too.’

Faith was distracted. ‘The boy? He was in the company back then. He could act rather well. I think he went on to another theatre and much bigger things.’

Nancy bent her head and laced her fingers with her mother’s. Eliza’s wedding ring was loose on the bone.

Devil and Cornelius came back, somewhat restored by toast and tea.

The day wore on. At the end of the afternoon Nancy walked up the road to the post office. The cold air was like a slap after the close fug of the sickroom. She telephoned Miss Dent, to let her know that she would have to be away from work for as long as her mother needed to be nursed. Miss Dent accepted her apologies with a brief word of sympathy and didn’t ask her when she expected to return to work.

At home again Nancy found Faith busy in the kitchen and hearty smells of cooking drifting up through the house. She tried to thank her, but Faith would hear none of it.

‘Who else needs me? Not Lizzie. And Matthew can look out for Tommy just as well as I can.’

Nancy put her arms around her aunt’s plump shoulders.

‘All the same, thank you,’ she said.

Soon there was a hot meal ready for Devil and Cornelius. The men ate quickly and gratefully. Cornelius brooded in silence but at least he didn’t mutter about the wounded waiting for his help, or watch the clock as if every spoonful might cost a man’s life.

Devil didn’t even contemplate going to the Palmyra for the evening performance.

‘Anthony will have to manage,’ he shrugged.

The evening slid into night. Devil dozed at the bedside with his head on his folded arms and Nancy and Faith took it in turns to lie down in Nancy’s bedroom. Cornelius padded between his own room and Eliza’s, and Nancy found his withdrawn vigilance oddly reassuring. He picked up the latest letter from Arthur and scanned it.

‘Have you sent for him? He would get compassionate leave, I think.’

Devil briefly shook his head. They all understood that he delayed because Arthur was to be shielded as far as possible.

‘Ah. Well, maybe it’s for the best. I think the crisis may be almost over.’

It seemed that Cornelius was right. The next time Eliza woke she was too weak to lift her head but she knew them all. Her eyes always came back to Devil.

Dr Vassilis was visibly surprised when he called the next day, but he pretended to have foreseen the improvement. He examined her before stepping well back to remove his muslin mask.

‘Yes, you see, it is just like I told you. It is not the strongest ones who survive. Last night I have a young man die, sick for one day and pfffff, he goes like blowing out this.’ He pointed to the candle in its holder on the night table. The family stared at him, not at all comforted, and the doctor snapped his bag shut. To Cornelius he said in a more cheerful voice, ‘How are you, my friend?’

Cornelius considered the question.

‘There has been more than enough dying, doctor. To sit and brood on it as I have been doing is not helpful. I find nursing my mother a more useful occupation.’

Vassilis looked shrewdly at him.

‘That is a fine discovery, Mr Wix.’

The doctor bowed and wished them good day. After she had seen him out Nancy gave way in private to tears of relief. To manage her feelings for Devil and Cornelius’s sake she set herself the job of laundering all the soiled bed linen and towels. In the scullery she put water on to boil and found a kind of painful oblivion in plunging her arms deep in the enamel wash tub and scrubbing with the laundry soap until her muscles ached. She tipped the scummy water down the stone sink and ran a fresh tub. She rinsed everything twice and fed the clean items through the mangle, leaning down on the heavy handle with all the weight of her body. She pegged out sheets under the tin roof that partly covered the back area and draped the towels on the wooden maiden suspended from the kitchen ceiling. Her arms were scalded crimson to the elbows.

Faith found her as she was finishing the work.

‘Nancy? Look at you. Doesn’t Eliza send out to a laundry?’

‘The boy came for it yesterday when we were all too busy. Anyway I needed to do it myself, and it’s made me feel much better. Is Ma sleeping?’

‘She is. Cornelius is with her. Your father’s exhausted so I told him to lie down in your room.’

‘That’s good.’

Faith regarded her with an odd expression.

‘Aunt Faith? Is something wrong?’

‘You are so like her, you know.’

Nancy was taken aback.

Her whole life was coloured by being unlike her mother and by wishing to resemble her more closely.

‘Not in your looks, although since you have grown up I see more of her in you every day. In your stubbornness, I mean. You won’t ever give up once you have fixed on an idea. Even when you were tiny, if you wanted to play with a toy you would have it, however hard the boys tried to take it off you. You wouldn’t yell, but you kept your eyes and your little hands fastened tight on it. Lizzie always understood the power of a bargain. She’d hand over the ball so as to get herself something better. You have your mother’s energy too.’ Faith pointed at the white ramparts of sheets, stirring in the wind. ‘She would have done that, before her strength went.’

‘Poor Ma,’ Nancy sighed.

She hadn’t been aware that she possessed Eliza’s iron will. Nancy’s own impression was of inhabiting the margins of her family. She stayed on the outskirts and kept quiet, mostly because of the Uncanny and her conviction that she had to protect it and keep it secret. Her way of camouflaging her difference was to be unobtrusive in plain sight.

She took it for granted that her father loved her, in the way that fathers always loved their only daughters, but she didn’t think he knew or understood her particularly well, any more than Eliza did. Most of her parents’ energies, after all, were applied to each other. The memory of the Queen Mab returned, and how her father’s first and strongest instinct had been to save his wife.

Nancy wiped her damp forehead with the back of her hand. Her shoulders ached from lifting and mangling wet towels, and there was a new and less manageable ache in her that she did not yet recognise. She wondered how it ever came about that you loved someone like a husband or wife, and were loved back. It seemed too complicated to happen very often and yet the suggestion of it was everywhere, except in her own life.

Faith saw her expression.

‘Nancy, dear. You’re very tired. You’ll be ill yourself if you don’t take care.’

‘It’s not that, Aunt Faith.’

‘What is it, then?’

Faith’s motherly concern touched her, and the ache faded a little. But Nancy’s instinct was always to parry a direct question so she turned aside and asked, ‘Will Ma get well?’

Faith used a folded cloth to lift a pan of scalding water. Clouds of steam billowed between them.

‘I believe she will recover from this bout, yes.’

Nancy could see that her aunt was disappointed by her reticence.

The next day Eliza was a little better. The sweating and shivering stopped, although the terrible cough persisted. The day after that Faith held her while Nancy fed her two or three spoonfuls of soup.

The household adjusted to the rhythms of nursing Eliza. Faith spent the days helping Nancy and Cornelius in Islington, but she returned to Matthew every evening because he complained so much about Lizzie’s cooking and standards of housekeeping.

After the end of her marriage Lizzie went back to her parents, although she confided to Nancy that it was difficult to live in a house that had become a shrine to Edwin and Rowland. Their boyhood possessions were preserved like relics and there were photographs of the dead sons everywhere. Nancy couldn’t say much in response to this, because Lizzie must think it unfair that Cornelius and Arthur were both still alive.

Lizzie had adopted a brisk manner that could make her seem a little hard. She had to give up her beloved job with the tea importer once she became a mother, but afterwards she had quickly yielded the daily care of Tommy to Faith, in favour of helping her father with the family greengrocery. The loss of his sons had aged Matthew Shaw, and Lizzie had energy and an undeniable talent for business. She made herself useful and then indispensable and she claimed a healthy wage for her efforts. Her short tenure as Jack Hooper’s wife had left her with a fierce desire for independence.

‘Mama shouldn’t have to run back and forth every day like this. My father could quite easily fry himself an egg,’ Lizzie said when she called one evening to see Eliza. ‘Although he doesn’t believe eggs and frying pans should be a man’s work.’

Nancy had sewn a set of muslin masks and her cousin wore one as she hovered uncertainly at the bedside. The women all agreed that little Tommy must be protected from infection, but there was also an understanding that Lizzie couldn’t be involved in caring for anyone who was ill. She was not a nurse, she would have insisted, and she had no talent for such things.

Lizzie had been unable to hide her shock at Eliza’s changed appearance. She chatted to her a little too brightly and disconnectedly through the layers of her mask, and was relieved when Nancy led her away before Eliza got overtired.

The cousins retreated downstairs. Lizzie stood by the kitchen range, tapped a cigarette on her thumbnail and expertly clicked a lighter. She had shortened her skirts and her hair and had recently started painting her lips. The dark lipstick stained the butt of the cigarette.

Exhaling sharply she exclaimed, ‘Poor Nancy. What a ghastly time you have all been through.’

Nancy accepted a cigarette and puffed inexpertly.

‘She’s getting better, that’s all that matters.’

‘She looks terrible.’

Lizzie was always blunt. To change the subject Nancy said, ‘What about you?’

Lizzie shrugged. ‘Tommy’s happy. He’ll start school in the autumn. My life’s all work, more’s the pity. I’d like a nice new boyfriend. I expect you would too, eh? You and I are both going to deserve some proper fun quite soon, darling.’

Devil had said the same thing.

‘Soon,’ Nancy said. She would have liked to believe it, and sometimes as she did the endless household chores she allowed herself a fantasy in which Gil Maitland’s cream Daimler drew up outside the house or in front of Lennox & Ringland. He knew where she lived and her place of work, but as the days passed and there was no evidence of him she told herself that of course a man like Gil was not going to materialise and sweep her off her feet. He had whiled away an hour in her company and given her a lift home because it was raining. Nothing more.

You are not Cinderella or a princess in a fairy tale. You are Nancy Wix. You can dream, but a dream is all it is.

Lizzie winked at her and began to talk about business. She quickly became animated. People needed novelty and some little luxuries, she declared. With the shipping routes open again and overseas trade growing, she was establishing a network of relationships with importers of exotic fruits. Pineapples from South America, mangoes from India, figs from the Mediterranean shores, all these could be brought in the holds of cargo ships and unloaded at the London or Liverpool docks. The dewy fruits would make their way, via the modern wholesale warehouse Lizzie had encouraged her father to acquire, to every quality greengrocer in the country. The miracle of refrigeration made all this easy, Lizzie explained, waving her hands. She still wore her wedding ring, Nancy noted.

‘Just wait and see. There will be a fresh pineapple or a peach on every table, I promise you. Not only in the great houses where the dukes and lords have their own hothouses.’

Nancy wondered if the war had been fought even partly to make a pineapple available to everyone who might desire one, but she said nothing. There had been so many unexpected outcomes of the conflict that the real impact seemed impossible to discern. Married women and those over thirty could vote and one of them had even been elected to Parliament. After all the suffragists’ meetings, and the broken windows and arson and arrests and prison sentences, it had taken the greater war to win the battle for them.

‘The how doesn’t matter,’ Jinny insisted. ‘It’s the what that counts.’

After a week at home, during which his growing distraction and restlessness reflected Eliza’s steady recovery, Devil announced that he must get back to the Palmyra.

‘Anthony Ellis does his best,’ he said, which meant that the manager’s best wasn’t good enough.

He confessed to Nancy that there was a crisis of loyalty to deal with because some of the artistes had not been paid for their most recent performances. They had refused to go onstage and he had been forced to cancel shows. There was an embarrassment concerning available funds, he said. Audiences had been sparse for weeks because people feared the influenza, but an almost empty theatre still cost the same to run as it did when full.